Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 22 January 2025, LG 0.423
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 22 January 2025, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Marco Palladino (Bank of France) will be talking about “The Unequal Impact of Firms on the Relative Pay ofWomen Across Countries”.
More information can be found here:
We use matched employer-employee datasets from the US and Europe to document the contribution of firm-specific wage premiums to the gender hourly wage gap. Our analysis reveals that cross-country differences in the overall gender wage gap are correlated with the gender wage premium gap. However, this gap varies considerably across the 11 countries in our study: while it accounts for about half of the gender wage gap in the US, it explains only 20 percent on average in Europe. We decompose this gender wage premium gap into two components: sorting (whether women work in lower-paying firms compared to similar men) and pay-setting (whether women earn less than similar men within the same firm). This decomposition reveals interesting differences across countries : in particular, the pay-setting component plays a larger role in countries with less centralized wage-setting institutions.We find that while the impact of pay-setting increases across the wage premium distribution, sorting effects become more pronounced over workers’ careers. Our analysis of rent-sharing reveals that women capture a smaller share of firm-wide rents than men in almost all countries. We find that firms offering longer work hours tend to pay higher premiums, with this hours-wage relationship being substantially stronger for men than women in most countries. We show that cross-country differences in sorting patterns result from both differential access to high-paying firms and differences in firms’ wage premium structures.We confirm and strengthen these findings by exploiting unique variation at the country-industry level.